While many challenges are shared by brick and mortar retailers and online retailers, the nature of a website or online service that offers the opportunity to browse and purchase goods or services online provides both additional capabilities as well as additional challenges. Some of the additional capabilities available to an online retailer include the ability to track what areas of an online store are visited, what products and services are viewed, time spent viewing certain areas or products, frequency of visit, referring sites, and even where a potential customer's mouse icon moves and rests on the page. Whether the online presence is a retailer of goods or services, an online directory for a physical venue (e.g. an informational page for a museum, park, or zoo), or even an online home for a non-profit organization or fundraising organization, such a breadth of data may represent a powerful resource. However, despite this additional breadth of data that is available to such online presences, the efforts of online presences to reach an audience are often based upon simplistic choices such as email distributions to every customer who has provided their email address, or email distributions to every customer who has purchased a good or service in the last month. This sort of heavy handed approach to audience communication may not be a problem for email distributions or targeted banner advertisements, but for print communications the cost of creation and mailing may make such broadly targeted efforts a poor choice.
One additional challenge is that the ease with which a potential customer can visit an online presence may lead to a much higher number of visits that have no purchase, service request, donation, or information request associated with them, since the visitor is not heavily invested in the choice to visit the online presence, and has spent little or no time traveling to the online presence via a web browser or other software. For example, in some cases, a potential customer may visit an online retailer and view several products at regular intervals of time, perhaps checking to see if the price has lowered or if additional product information or reviews are available. Since the potential customer is not completing a transaction, and in many cases is not even logging into the sight and identifying themselves, information related to this repeated visitation of the retailer and its products is essentially wasted for purposes of marketing to that potential customer. This wasted data is potentially valuable, since it could be used to provide an indication of a potential customer's engagement with the online retailer and its products, which may provide an indication of the potential customer's receptiveness to marketing efforts.
Some online presences attempt to recapture this data by essentially forcing users to log in to an online storefront or interface, through either obfuscating products, product prices, or other features until a user has a logged in, or by generating a steady stream of reminders, pop ups, and other interface elements that force a user to acknowledge the need to log in. Once the user is forced to identify themselves, the online presence may then attempt to associate some of this wasted data with the user. However, these methods tend to alienate and drive away many visitors, such that even if data is successfully captured and associated with a user it may be of no value since the user may be less likely to respond to a subsequent communication from the online presence in the future as a result of the aggressive approach to identifying the visitor.
Since many online presences have chosen to simply ignore mail advertisement due to the high cost and risk associated with such a marketing campaigns, a powerful tool for growth of an audience is lost. However, if non-transaction data could be seamlessly captured and associated with a visitor, and if that visitor could be identified without harming the user experience, it could allow online presence to target a narrow and receptive audience with print communications. What is needed, therefore, is an improved system for statistical evaluation of non-transactional information in order to determine user engagement with services, products, or purposes of an online presence.